As the number of available sources of broadcast programming increases, it becomes more and more difficult for consumers to locate program material of interest among the myriad of choices. In the early days of radio, a listener was often presented with a very small number of listening options within a given radio market. In the past, most radio stations within a given market broadcast a roughly equivalent program mix of news, sports, music and entertainment programming.
Over the past decades, the number of broadcast channels available to consumers in all broadcast mediums has risen dramatically. As of Sep. 30, 2000, there were over 4600 AM and 8000 FM radio stations, and over 1600 television stations licensed to broadcast within the United States. As an example, in New York City alone, there are 28 AM and 43 FM radio stations.
As the number of broadcast channels has increased, the diversity and differentiation of program materials amongst the stations has risen correspondingly. Stations now typically offer programming formats tightly tailored to target specific demographic audiences. Examples of the new formats include: Easy Listening, Jazz, Hard Rock, Religious, Talk Radio, Sports, News, Ethnic, and Children's Programming.
As a result, it can be a daunting task for a user to “surf” through the multitude of channels and program formats to find a program of interest. In order to alleviate this problem, modern radio receivers commonly employ user definable preset buttons where a user can assign a particular radio frequency to a button on the radio receiver, allowing the user direct access to a favorite frequency. In this way, a listener can customize their radio receiver to best fit their listening habits.
While programmable station presets offer a significant step forward in listener convenience, a listener still must perform the rather onerous task of programming the station presets into their radio receiver. In other words, the user must traverse the entire spectrum of receivable stations in their area one-by-one, deciding whether the station should be added to a programmable preset button. Since the number of user definable preset buttons is usually quite small, the listener must be judicious in the selection of stations for the presets. Also, when a listener traverses the stations during the programming operation, the station may be broadcasting material which does not indicate its format (e.g., commercials or news at the top of the hour). In this instance, the listener might inadvertently skip a station which is of interest to the listener or be forced to wait though commercials when programming the radio receiver.
Also, the stations selected by the listener at the time of programming are statically stored in the radio receiver, while radio stations and formats change dynamically. That is, station formats can change, stations can appear or disappear, and listener's program preferences may change. In these instances, the preset buttons on radio receiver must be periodically re-programmed with the updated listening choices.
Perhaps the most daunting problem with a static set of user defined presets, is the fact that many listeners are mobile and the broadcasting range of most stations is quite limited. For instance, many listeners commute back and forth to work every day in their automobile over relatively long distances. Stations that are tunable at a listener's home location may not be tunable at a user's work location. There is also a significant percentage of listeners who are itinerant by the nature of their professions (e.g., over-the-road truck drivers, traveling sales representatives, etc.). Also, most listeners find themselves occasionally in distant locations where their standard set of radio presets in their automobile or portable device no longer tune to listenable stations.
To partially alleviate this problem, some radio receivers offer a feature where the radio will automatically load the direct access preset buttons with the strongest available stations in the listener's location at the time of programming. While this feature provides the listener with a set of stations to listen to at virtually any location, the stations loaded into the presets may not be of interest to the user. Also, there are usually many more listenable stations than there are presets available on the radio receiver. Thus, many stations of particular interest to the listener may not be loaded into the presets because of the limited space available.